UK Libraries celebrated the 100-year anniversary of women’s suffrage on Tuesday with an address by Melanie Beals Goan, a professor of 20th-century U.S. history at UK.

Goan’s speech highlighted Kentucky’s often-forgotten importance in the highly mythologized women’s suffrage movement.

In August 1920, Congress ratified the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting the right to vote to women. 

“We make (suffrage) simple, little chunks we can file away in our memories. We like to compartmentalize and boil things down to neat tiny narratives,” Goan said. “Those simplified pictures we have in our head (of) national heroes don’t tell us much about what went on here in our own state.”

In her address, Goan profiled Kentuckians who made important contributions to the women’s suffrage movement. These figures included Laura Clay, who toured the United States making speeches advocating women’s suffrage, and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge, who was instrumental in persuading Kentucky legislators to ratify the 19th Amendment.

“Kentucky did its part to ratify this amendment,” Goan said. “I hope 2020 is a year for us to take stock, really add to the mental picture we have of suffrage.”

Goan’s book about women’s suffrage in Kentucky, tentatively titled “United We Stand, Divided We Fall: Making Kentucky Women Voters,” will potentially be published this August.

The event was held in the Special Collections Research Center of the Margaret I. King Library to commemorate its current exhibit, Women of Strength and Mind: The Suffrage Question in Kentucky, which will run through February.

According to Doug Way, Dean of Libraries, the exhibit features items from SCRC collections, such as pro-suffrage postcards and photos of suffrage marches, that provide a firsthand glimpse of the women’s suffrage movement in Kentucky. 

The event concluded with a performance by the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Chorus. The group, founded in 2018, aims to “channel” the spirit and bravery of 1920s suffragettes to educate new generations, according to member Nancy Atcher.

“These women were just like us,” Atcher said. “They weren’t famous people, but most of them were ladies like us doing their thing.”